


love the one you hold

by ladyknope



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 04:12:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6179737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyknope/pseuds/ladyknope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pregnancy fic/shameless fluff, written pre-season 7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love the one you hold

She wakes up to something pressing on her ribs.

Her first thought is that she’d probably be less annoyed about waking up this way if the thing making her this uncomfortable was one or two overactive babies (something she isn’t expecting for a few more months thankfully) and not her husband’s hand thrashing around behind her. Right now, exhausted in the dark of night, she tries to ignore her annoyance and just go back to sleep. But when Ben starts mumbling, she turns over to look at him, concerned. In all the time they’ve shared a bed, she can recount each individual incidence of him sleeping fitfully enough for her to notice. And now, as he mumbles out nonsense phrases like “cherry tuition” while his face tightens and his eyebrows knit together, she can guarantee she knows the reason he’s waking her up.

He raises his hand in front of him again, moving similar to when his words are coming out faster than he wants them to. She slips her hand gently into the one raised in the air in front of her and pulls it around her waist. He seems to calm down a bit, pulling her closer and tickling her face with a heavy sigh. A few minutes pass in peace before she feels his breath on her face. He’s talking again, and not coherently enough to understand the actual words, but she still understands their meaning. She pushes her fingers over the back of his neck, feels the sweat and the heat and tries to bring him gently back to consciousness by whispering his name over and over.

His whole body jerks when he finally wakes up, the hand on her waist squeezing her hip.

“It’s just a dream,” she says softly.

“Sorry.” He blinks his eyes a few times and when they finally focus on her there’s regret and something like guilt in his eyes. “Sorry, sorry,” he repeats before he kisses her forehead and shakes his head a little.

She feels relief when she asks if he wants to tell her about it and he says no. And maybe she’d press him more, try to find a way to make him feel more settled, if growing three babies took less of her energy. Instead she rolls onto her back, tugs on his arm a few times until she forces him to snuggle close to her. His face settles into the curve of her neck- she pulls his t-shirt up a little as she rubs his back so the sweat will dry while his palm settles wide and warm on the flat of her stomach.

“They hated me.” She’s almost asleep when his words come out against her collarbone, but she peels her eyes open again.

“Who did?”

“The babies. Except there were more of them, six maybe seven. They cried every time I picked them up and you kept trying to hold them all at once but it was too much and I couldn't help you.”

“Babe, you’re just...”

“And then they were older, 16 or 17 and they were asking me about college and buying a car and how could I not have saved enough for all of them? And I didn’t know what to say, I just kept punching numbers into this old printing calculator. But it ran out of ink, so I had to calculate by hand, but the pencil I was using kept breaking and..”

“Ben!” She pulls on his hair until he looks her in the eye, smiles gently up at him. She looks at him for a moment, cupping his face and mustering enough energy in her voice so he knows she’s serious. “You’re gonna be a great dad.”

“Maybe, but that’s not...”

“You will be. You already are.”

He presses his lips together and closes his eyes as he lets all the air out of his lungs in one long exhale. She knows most of the time his default is to worry. To borrow trouble and jump to conclusions before anything has even happened. But she’s never doubted his ability to succeed, especially at something he’s wanted for a long time, at something they’re doing as a team. He likes to plan and tries to extrapolate the future. But Leslie knows that once it all becomes too much, once he’s become more worried about the landing than excited about the free fall, that’s when she needs to squeeze his hand a little tighter, to remind him that they’re jumping together.

She can’t tell if he’s accepted her reassurances completely and knows this won’t be the last conversation like this. But she feels some of his tension drain when he presses his lips to hers, hard, like the small connection releases some valve and relieves the pressure. He relaxes enough that she can pull him back down on top of her, his weight pressing comfortably into her side.

“Besides, if I thought you were going to be less than amazing at this, do you think I’d let you put these babies in me in the first place?”

He laughs, presses his lips to her shoulder and the hinge of her jaw, whispers his love in her ear and finally, she feels him squeeze her hand in return.

//

So he freaks out a little at first, but after that initial wave of panic, Ben sees more clearly the reasons getting to have not one but three babies (three babies) really is kind of amazing and wonderful. Or it will be, once Leslie actually has the babies and he can stop worrying about how she’s carrying three (three) humans inside her petite torso. (He definitely should have listened when she warned him not to look at Google images of anything having to do with triplets and pregnancy). Once the babies are born then, then he won’t be so worried. He’ll have concerns of course, but definitely less than he does now (right?).

He learns to enjoy it more. Leslie talks of Supreme Court and political dynasties, but he imagines three miniature mitts and bats lined up along the shelf in their garage- Knope-Wyatt in block lettering across the back of three small, grass-stained jerseys. They can fill all infielder positions and have someone up to bat just using their family. Three sets of smiles, three babies giggling at once- getting at least four times as many hugs when he gets home from work.

He makes Leslie pull up her shirt and stand next to one of the only clear walls in their house every week in the same outfit- takes pictures of her expanding stomach and tries (and fails) not to bring up how she’ll be kind of like a live-action version of Claymation for the next few months. But she just giggles, kisses the side of his head as he stays kneeled down to review the pictures on his camera, takes it for the compliment she knows he meant it to be. And he reminds himself that it’s not just his wife who’s having triplets, it’s Leslie Knope.

//

“Shit.”

“You okay?”

“Perfect.”

She’s frustrated and cranky, her back hurts and her feet are swollen, but otherwise she’s perfect. And she doesn’t want to complain, not about being pregnant and especially not about being pregnant with triplets when it feels like just yesterday she was talking about being immune to stress. She thinks about how lucky she is a lot of the time - getting three kids for the price of one, getting to have kids at all. And she’s not as tired now, but that doesn’t exactly make up for the fact that she can’t sleep on her stomach anymore or that her doctor warned her about possibly going on bed-rest in a few months. The facts that she can’t bend over comfortably to tie her shoes, or wear heels without her feet hurting at the end of the day, or touch up her toe nails without spilling some of the bottle on the bathroom floor don’t help either.

So, actually, she really wants to complain. Especially because now, on top of everything else, she has to find some way to get this red stain out of her carpet before she’s forced to buy a rug to cover it. She’s searching under the sink for stain remover when Ben finally appears in the bathroom doorway.

“Need help?”

“I’m just trying to find stain remover,” if there weren't so many different cleaning products in such a small space this would be a lot easier, “who bought all of these?”

“Uh, you did?” He says it like a question, even though it’s the truth, like he’s not sure that’s the answer she wants to hear right now.

He places his hand on her shoulder and pulls slightly, as if there’s room enough for both of them to look. As if she even wants his help. She’s too flustered to remember the lid to the nail polish she’s gripping in her hand isn’t screwed all the way down when she jerks her arm away from his touch and suddenly there’s a red streak across Ben’s undershirt too.

They both stare slack-jawed for a few moments. She doesn’t know if she wants to cry or yell or both until she finally lands on, “Ben!”

He looks at her wide-eyed, like a deer trapped between deciding to run backward or forward across the road.

“I told you not to help me.”

“When?”

“Two seconds ago! Never mind just,” she nudges him backward a bit to start rubbing with nail polish remover, “just let me finish this, then I’ll fix your shirt.”

She doesn’t look up, keeps rubbing and pouring and rubbing and feels all her anger drain to a pit in her stomach and a lump in her throat. She hears Ben screw the lid of the bottle and place it on the counter before he leaves the bathroom without a word. When she knows he’s out of ear shot, she sniffles a little and tries to breathe enough to force back her tears. She hates getting mad for no real reason, especially at Ben. The image of his startled face that turned to soft understanding catalyzes her frustration enough to let a few tears drop, before she wipes them away with the back of her hand.

He returns silently, kneeling in front of her with a spray bottle and a clean rag, sans shirt. When he starts rubbing the spot, she gets back up as smoothly as she can, goes to lie down on their bed and lean her head against the headboard while she closes her eyes. Her eyes are still closed when he sits next to her a few minutes later. He still doesn’t say anything, just puts his arm around her shoulder and rearranges them until she’s between his legs, the back of her head resting on his bare collarbone, his fingers twining with hers.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...”

“Shh,” he cuts her off. “Just, let’s not talk for a minute.”

She wants to, but she waits because this usually works- feeling his chest press and release against her back, his breath on her ear, his heartbeat under her spine. She counts the full 60 seconds in her mind before she apologizes again. This time he lets her. Lets her rant for a while, because once she gets going it’s hard to stop. When she’s done he reminds her that he’s there for her, that he’s as much a part of her team on this as the recall, the election, the Harvest Festival.

Later, after he’s pulled her feet into his lap, toes spread with foam between them and he’s finished painting her toes, she lets him take off her shirt and guide her to the edge of the bed so that he can rub the sore muscle in her back loose. He kisses up her spine, across her shoulder, lets his hands smooth over the curve of her stomach and higher. And she remembers some of the immediate advantages to letting Ben take control for a little while.

//

His throat tightens as hard as Leslie’s fingers around his when they find out the sex of the triplets. Their personalities and their futures have played out in his mind in half-imagined details-they have Leslie’s passion and his love of numbers, they become teachers, help run each other’s campaigns, raise mini-horses in rural Indiana.

But now it’s different. Now his mind runs wild with images of two boys and a girl, fighting over toys, two heads of short blonde hair and one with long reflected back to him in a row in the rear-view mirror.

He takes his eyes off the screen to see a tear run from the corner of Leslie’s eye to the tip of her nose, her face still tilted toward the grainy image of their babies. He takes his hand from hers to trace the wetness with his thumb right before another tear billows over in its place.

“You okay?”

It’s almost a rhetorical question given how often he asks it. He’ll probably never be used to how much more emotional his wife is, making his urge to check on her and take care of her impossible to squelch (even if those emotions easily turn to annoyance).

But she just turns her head, cups her palm over his hand on her cheek and says softly up to him, “Perfect.”

//

“I mean I can understand making changes because they’re inhibited by a new medium, but this just felt like creating drama for the sake of drama, you know?”

Ben ends his rant, but keeps lightly pushing his thumbs into the bottom of one of Leslie’s feet. By now he’s probably just warming her skin, too distracted by all the problems he still can’t let go of from an old episode of Game of Thrones to focus on rubbing her feet. He looks to the other end of the couch where Leslie’s head rests in the palm of her hand, her feet stretched out into his lap, and guesses it probably doesn’t matter how lack his massage skills are right now because she’s sound asleep.

She’s back to her increased sleeping schedule now. It was like this at the beginning too, naps after work and staying with him in bed until it was time to get ready for work. Not that he’s complaining by any means. The pattern only lasted a few weeks though- until recently when it seems like everything has caught up with her again. He feels selfish, enjoying this part of her pregnancy that she mostly finds inconvenient. But he lets himself enjoy it because he can’t help but think about how much she’ll miss this, how much they’ll both miss getting to sleep through the night with only Leslie’s trips to the bathroom to disturb them.

He turns off the TV and carefully slips out from under her legs and kneels in front of her. He needs to wake her up, she won’t sleep well on the couch- sometimes it’s hard for her to get comfortable even on a surface that’s much wider than her belly- but he also doesn’t want to disturb her. He can tell she’s falling into a deep sleep- her eyes move under their lids and she’s making noises that sound like words trying to escape the back of her throat.

He’s pushing her hair back behind her ear, delaying the inevitable, when her hand suddenly waves around until it makes contact with his arm, and she finally mumbles out the words she’s been trying to say in her half-sleep state.

“Tell Abby to go to sleep.”

He thinks he knows but he still asks, “Who’s Abby?”

Her eyes don’t open, but he can see her annoyance in the knitting of eyebrows. His smile widens.

“Your daughter. She won’t go back to sleep.”

He can’t tell how serious she is right now. Half of the time she gives heartfelt, spontaneous speeches while she’s completely unconscious and the other half is randomly strung together words that only resemble sentences. But they haven’t settled on names and neither of them has mentioned Abigail before.

He’s trying out the name in his mind when he thinks of something else, “How do you know it’s her?” It takes her a minute to respond, so he starts stroking her hair and asks her again.

“I’m the mom.” She moves her hand to the top of her bump. “I’m the mom and I know she kicks me.”

He doesn’t argue with that, just bends closer to kiss right below where her hand rests and says “Time for bed” to both the future and current restless sleepers in his life. She wakes up just enough for him to lead her up the stairs and under the covers where her eyes shut tight again.

Abigail. He wonders if she’s the one he feels moving the most against her skin, if it’s the boys ganging up on their sister, if all three are going to come out dancing. And for a brief moment he’s jealous- jealous that Leslie gets to experience and know things about them that he never will. But then she lets out a soft grunt and rubs her hand over her belly again and he’s thankful and grateful that she’s doing this for them instead.

//

Four weeks later and baby Abigail Ann Knope-Wyatt is still clinging to Leslie’s ribs until the last possible moment. She’s the last to be born, two minutes after Robert Henry Knope-Wyatt and six minutes after her oldest brother George Benjamin Knope-Wyatt.

After that everything is a blur. She remembers Ben kissing her forehead through the mask on his face, his hospital wrist band lightly scraping her cheek, a nurse showing her their tiny faces for a moment. She has enough time to notice the boys’ light brown hair and Abby’s blonde before they’re whisked away. Everything is a rush of worry and excitement and disbelief.

Until all three babies are snuggled skin-to-skin on her chest, a warm blanket draped over their bare backs and Ben unable to look away or stop smiling, and she pauses for three times as long as she normally would to remember the moment.


End file.
